The Jew's Wife & Other Stories (19 page)

   “
Your mother
said you had some sort of car trouble. On the Turnpike, wasn’t
it?”

   
Father Walther
described his misfortunes with the Ford. Small listened intently,
shaking his head in amazement.

   “
How dreadful.
And you had to leave it there? Just junk it?”

   “
There didn’t
seem to be anything else I could do.”

   “
How did you
manage to get down here?”

   
Father Walther
explained the arrangement he had made with the dealer in his
parish.

   “
Will he give
you a good deal, do you think? Can you trust the man? The reason I
ask,” Small continued, his toothy smile replaced by a businesslike
manner which suggested a very different person from the affable
retiree he had been playing thus far, “I have a friend in the
District who sells the sort of car you might be interested in. I
mean,” he added, his teeth appearing again like stars in a
changeable sky, “I presume you don’t want to be driving around in a
pink Caddy.”

   
He reached into
the inside pocket of his suit jacket and produced a business card
that he handed across the table just as the waitress arrived with
their dinners. The card read, “DC Motors. Shel Simon.”

   “
I guess you
noticed my dealer’s plates,” Small said, inserting a big white
napkin into the collar of his shirt. It was the same way the
Monsignor ate. “Shelly will give you a good deal if you tell him I
sent you. Better yet, let me give him a call in the
morning.”

   “
There’s no need
to go to any trouble.”

   “No trouble,” Small replied,
happily forking some fish. “No trouble at all.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

   
It was after ten
o’clock when Sidney Small dropped him off at the hospital parking
lot. They had spoken very little about his mother. Indeed, they had
had very little to say to each other on any subject. The man was
agreeable enough, even charming in a crude,
I-can-get-it-for-you-wholesale manner. But he was as different from
the kind of person the priest’s father had been as any two men
could possibly be. Where Small was flashy and overdressed, Carl
Walther had always worn subdued, even drab colors and styles. Where
Small tended toward the vain and demonstrative, the elder Walther
had chosen reserve. It was true that Small seemed to have plenty of
money, but Katherine Walther had never complained about not being
rich. She used to tell her sons their poverty (the family was
actually lower-middle-class) was a gift from God. What, then, was
it about this man that she found so appealing?

   
Lost in these
thoughts, Father Walther would have missed the exit for Burnham
Wood if it had not been clearly marked.

   
The highway
neatly bifurcated the planned city where his mother lived—actually
a sprawling piece of suburbia built around a central mall. His
brother had bought into the development when it was barely off the
drawing board. The elder Walthers moved there five years later, not
to the hi-rise where his mother now lived but to a three-room
apartment in McCoy’s Corner. They stayed on when his brother was
transferred to the Coast, having become used to the comforts of
contemporary living. Two years later his father died and, unable to
afford her old apartment on what was left of her husband’s pension,
his mother moved into the senior citizens’ housing where she was
eligible for a government-subsidized rent.

   
He stepped into
one of the two elevators standing open and empty in the lobby and
rode up to the ninth floor alone. A big floor-to-ceiling window
provided the only break in a monotonous stretch of long corridor.
He stopped to look out at the scattering of lights below. A dark
patch in the landscape indicated a horse farm that his mother used
to make a great deal of when she first moved in. She had enjoyed
watching the colts gamboling in the big field or, in hot weather,
nuzzling their mothers near the side of a stream. She never
mentioned the horses anymore, and in the dark he had no way of
knowing if they were still there. The lights of a jetliner angled
suddenly down from the starless sky, making its approach to Dulles
International. Thanks to the thick plate glass, it moved as
silently as the toy cars speeding through the darkened
fields.

   
He finished his
office and made a cup of tea. There was no milk, so he had to make
do with a vegetable creamer. He found some cookies to go with the
tea, then turned on the television and sat down in the apartment’s
only armchair, a leftover from his father’s retirement. As he
waited for a series of commercials to end, he noted a new
convertible sofa. The rest of the furniture was all familiar—an oak
folding table his brother had refinished years ago; the seascape on
the wall behind the sofa; and the television itself, a color set
his parents bought shortly after moving to Maryland. There were new
arrangements of plastic flowers, looking remarkably lifelike. Near
the glass doors leading out to a terrace his mother never used
because of her hay fever was a row of artificial-looking but
apparently genuine potted plants. He decided he would sleep on the
sofa, although he would not bother to open it as his mother would
have insisted.

   
A popular
comedian was substituting for the late-night talk show’s regular
host. He endured the inane repartee until the commercial break,
then turned it off and started to undress.

   
The brash ring
of the telephone was as unexpected as a fire alarm. His mother
apparently kept it turned up to full volume. He rushed to prevent
its waking the rest of the building.

   “
Is that you,
Father? I’ve been trying to reach you all evening.”

    “
Hello,
Margaret. I was at the hospital.”

   “
That’s what I
figured. But I knew visiting hours end around eight-thirty. So when
I still couldn’t reach you at ten I began to worry. She isn’t in
intensive care, is she?”

   “
No, no. She
seems fine. They’re going to run some tests tomorrow, but I think
she just overdid it.”

   “
Thanks be to
God. I was worried sick when I heard the news from Father
George.”

   “
I was pretty
upset myself for a while.”

   “
And then I
called and got no answer. So I thought to myself, ‘Where could
Father be? He’s surely not out gallivanting, with his mother lying
sick in the hospital.’”

   “
No,” he replied
with a forced laugh, “not much chance of that.”

   “
So, then I
thought to myself, ‘Dear Lord, I hope she hasn’t taken a turn for
the worse and they’ve moved her to intensive care.’ I know they
allow visitors at all hours in the intensive care unit. Wasn’t I
with my own mother two days straight before she died?”

   “
Nothing like
that, Margaret. I just went out to get a bite to eat.”

   “
Well,” she
said, taking a deep breath, “you don’t know what a relief it is to
hear that.”

   “
I appreciate
your concern, Margaret. I should have called the
rectory.”

   “
You had more
important concerns on your mind, Father.”

   “
How are things
back at the ranch?”

   “
Much the same.
Father George is at sixes and sevens, but I suppose he’ll manage.
And of course the Old One is his usual grouchy self.... Wait. You
did get a call,” she said as if it were something that had slipped
her mind. “From that same person.”

   “
Which person is
that, Margaret?”

   “
That Miss
Sykes. Or is it Mrs. Sykes??”

   “
Did she leave a
message?”

   “
No, she didn’t.
She just said to tell you she called. I told her you probably
wouldn’t be back for several days.”

   “
Were there any
other calls?”

   “
No, just that
one, Father. She sounded disappointed when I said you were
away.”

   “
She’s the
relation of an old school friend. I’m sure if it were anything
important she would have left a message.”

   “
I suppose. What
shall I say if she calls back?”

   
This was the
question he had been waiting for. He knew his reputation as a
priest, at least in Margaret’s eyes, was on the line, and who knew
where the tale would end if his housekeeper began to entertain
doubts about him?

   “
Just ask her to
leave a message. I hardly know the woman.”

   “
You wouldn’t
want me to give her your mother’s number?”

   “
No,” he said,
wearying of the game. But if it was just a game, why did he feel
like St. Peter after he had denied Christ in Pilate’s garden?
“There’s no need.”

   “
Alright,
Father,” Margaret replied brightly. “I’ll do just as you
say.”

   
She ended by
asking him to tell his mother that she was making a novena to the
Blessed Virgin for her recovery.

   
The next morning
the cornfields were scarcely visible beyond the pasture nine
stories below. No horses were in sight. Jetliners continued to move
cautiously through the dense cloud layer, engines straining to keep
the machines on target in a world grown blind and
inhospitable.

   
Visiting hours
did not start until two p.m. He had slept well but was fully awake
at seven-thirty, so he had the entire morning to kill. He said
mass, read his office and ate a leisurely breakfast. But it was
then still only nine-thirty. He decided to read for a while, then
drive to the mall for lunch.

   
His mother kept
the remnants of the family library, never an extensive collection,
in a small bookcase that stood to one side of the twin bed where
she slept. Ted had taken the other twin for his boy. A desk that
Ted had refinished at the same time he stripped and varnished the
dining table stood beside the bookcase.

   
Some of
the book spines were instantly familiar:
The Five Little Peppers, Pollyanna,
a complete set of
Journeys Through
Bookland.
They predated his earliest
memories. His mother used to read him nursery rhymes from volume
one of
Journeys Through
Bookland
,
still
the only part of the set to show any wear. Other
books—
Eat Well to Stay Well; God Love
You
,
by Fulton J.
Sheen—represented a later period of family history. Still others
had appeared when he was in his adolescence. Some, still in dust
their jackets, were recent and unfamiliar acquisitions: a history
of the Irish “race”; some popular fiction, including a best-selling
priest novel; a consumer report on prescription drugs; the
autobiography of a 1940s film star.

   
He also found
one of his high school texts, a copy of the
Aeneid
which for some reason had
survived all his mother’s spring cleanings. He opened to a random
page and came upon his adolescent handwriting carefully penciled
into the margins—grammatical notes on tricky constructions, cross
references—but no translations, which were strictly forbidden by
his teacher, Father Patwell.

   
He tried reading
the Latin but quickly found himself lost in a maze of passive
participles and ablative absolutes. It was hard to believe he had
ever mastered such difficult material. Certainly the old Church
Latin he had come across read in seminary bore little relation to
these complicated constructions.

   
He put
the
Aeneid
back
and removed
The Five Little Peppers
from the shelf above. He could not recall anyone
ever actually reading any of these novels, though he vaguely
remembered using them for building blocks and scribbling on the
blank pages at the front- and end-leaves when he was still a
pre-schooler. His marks, primitive attempts at the alphabet, each
letter of which took up an entire page, were still visible,
suggesting a Richard Walther even less familiar than that of the
adolescent, but at least rememberable , version of him expressed by
the handwriting in his high school text.

   
He closed the
book and replaced it. He didn’t open any others.

   
When he arrived
at the start of visiting hours, his mother was conferring with her
doctor. Father Walther had met him when he took his mother for a
checkup during a previous mid-summer visit. His mother owned
neither a car nor a driver’s license. She had been dependent on his
brother to go anywhere but the mall, which was serviced by a
shuttle bus that stopped at the senior citizens’ project. When Ted
moved she was left to fend for herself.

   “
Hello, Doctor,”
he said, noting that his mother’s roommate was gone and that the
bed had been made up with fresh sheets. “How’s the
patient?”

   “
I think she’ll
be herself again in a day or two,” the handsome Southerner replied,
regarding his patient sternly. “I just hope she realizes now that
the human body is not indestructible.”

   
The idea of his
mother thinking otherwise struck the priest as absurd. She was
never stingy with the time or effort she gave her fellow tenants,
but he had never gotten the impression she was overtaxing
herself.